Chapter 2 - Current earth-observation capabilities and skills

Abstract

Climate change is a fact and renewable energy sources are the most efficient and most promising ways the world can practice in order to stave off the worst effects that are caused to the environment and to human health. Earth Observations (EO) are an extremely important field which is the source of a huge amount of information and data crucial for the solar energy collection and exploitation. Weather forecast, aerosols, and clouds are three key factors which affect the solar radiance and by extension the amount of power that PV structures are creating. The importance of EO lies in the fact that they provide the evidence necessary for informed decision-making and this is apparent in both the short and longer term. EOs are distinguished into ground-based and satellite-based. Ground-based EO networks are using modern technologies and tools, like pyranometers, pyrgeometer, pyrheliometers, sun photometers, and more, capable of observing solar radiation in different wavelengths. Satellite-based observations refer to the Earth observation satellites, which observe various phenomena that happens on the Earth from space. They are the next step in the environmental data collection process, since they can provide a more comprehensive range of information, covering larger spatial areas from sensors onboard spaceborne satellites which are output as imagery. More than 150 Earth-observation satellites are currently in orbit, carrying sensors that measure different sections of the visible, infrared, and microwave regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Both ground-based and satellite-based EOs are of particular importance to the study of the factors, like weather, aerosols, and clouds, which affect the solar radiance and its related energy conversion structures. For the European Union, the Earth Observation program, which provided all the essential environmental information both from ground-based and satellite-based observation networks, is Copernicus.